Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Anyway, when Spiessbach found out that the Israelis were closing in on him, they got into a murder-suicide pact, the pair of ‘em. He shot her first, and then himself right there after. Considering what they’ve both done to the people of this sanatorium ever since then, I’d say it wasn’t much of a tragedy that they decided to off themselves…except for her having been pregnant, and having deprived her own children of their mother too. That strikes me as a real shame,” Billy finished earnestly.

  “You said there were two reasons why he killed himself,” Becky pointed out. “If Mossad catching up with him was the first one, was tuberculosis the other?”

  “Partly. You see, Spiessbach was up to some pretty gnarly stuff up here,” Billy explained, using his beefy paws for emphasis. “Looks like once he left ze Fatherland for the last time—” putting two fingertips under his nose and making a mock-Nazi salute with the other hand, he did a very un-PC Hitler imitation— “and came to the land of the free, the good doctor never lost his taste for experimentation.” He shrugged, then mimed cutting open an invisible patient with an invisible scalpel. “Mrs. Sharpe here calls him ‘the Butcher,’ and she’s not far wrong on that account. I don’t know what his motivations were…what they are…but there was nothing he wouldn’t try on the poor, unfortunate souls that those nincompoops at the state blindly entrusted into his care.”

  “And he’s still at it,” Matilda wailed. Becky moved to put an arm around her, before checking herself when she remembered that it would only sink right through her. “Every night, Becky…every night, he comes for us, him and his goons. They cart us off to the operating room and they…they…” She simply couldn’t finish, breaking down into a fresh round of sobs and wails.

  “There, there,” Billy dropped a comforting arm around her shoulders. He looked me right in the eye, then did the same thing to Becky. “Matilda’s right, guys. Every evening after dark, they come for somebody new. Sometimes three, four, or more on one night, depending on his mood, I guess.”

  “Even you?” Becky asked, wide-eyed.

  “Even me,” Billy confirmed darkly. “I’m a big, strong guy, sure — but there are always more of them than there are of us. Not to mention the fact that I’m usually a lot weaker than I look. That’s the lung-rot, see? I figured it would go away when I died, but it didn’t. Damn thing’s still here, making my afterlife miserable.”

  He tapped his chest with a pointer finger. Almost as an afterthought, Billy coughed, bringing a clenched fist up to cover his mouth. I’d never seen a spirit’s face turn red before, but if it had been possible, Billy ought to have done it just then — the cough was that harsh on the ear. I winced with sympathy.

  “I just don’t get it.” Becky stood, pacing the cramped confines of the bedroom as she talked. She made a deliberate effort not to actually walk through Billy, whose considerable frame filled the exterior doorway. “You guys are ghosts, right…spirits? I don’t mean to be rude, but why would anybody want to do surgery on you? I mean, it wouldn’t work! How could it?”

  “The young lady is absolutely right,” Matilda said to me, absently dabbing at her teary eyes. Then she turned to look at Becky. “But he’s mad, you see. Totally and utterly stark raving mad.”

  An insane spirit? I pondered the idea for a moment, and decided that it might make sense. I hadn’t been aware of my Deadseer gifts for long enough to know more than the tiniest fraction of what there was to know about the spirit realm, but the idea of insanity being brought across along with the soul when it transitioned over wasn’t a big stretch for me to believe. I would have to ask Lamiyah, the next time I saw her…

  That thought sent a sharp stab of fear through me, making my stomach churn. I didn’t even know whether I would ever see Lamiyah again, after what had happened earlier. On the other hand, after those two lunatics had started firing off guns in the downstairs hallway, I might end up seeing a whole lot more of Lamiyah in the very near future, if I didn’t make it out of Long Brook alive…and that got me thinking about Brandon once again.

  We were getting distracted again, and needed to get ourselves back on track if there was going to be any hope of us rescuing him. I opened my mouth to say just that, but before I could speak, Billy got in first.

  “Spiessbach ain’t evil for the sake of being evil, guys. Not many people really are, when you think about it. Matilda’s right; he’s crazy through and through, and that’s why he keeps cutting up the poor souls that he’s kept trapped here. They’re bound to him, you see, the same in death as they…as we, were in life; but he ain’t torturing us just for the sake of it. In his mind, he ain’t even torturing us at all. In his own nutty way, I think Spiessbach genuinely wants to cure us, and he works hour after hour to try and find a treatment that will do the trick.”

  “But it’s the Twenty-First Century!” Becky pointed out, smacking a clenched fist into her palm for added emphasis. “We can treat tuberculosis now, with drugs and stuff like that. It’s not necessary to cut people up any more.”

  “Becky, you have to understand that for you it’s the Twenty-First Century, and for him it’s the Twenty-First Century,” Billy said in an entirely reasonable tone of voice, nodding towards me, “but you have to remember that for me, for the lovely Matilda here, and most importantly of all for Dr. Spiessbach, there ain’t no such thing. The clock stopped for us when we died. Spiessbach might as well be trapped in the Fifties or Sixties, you see. Time’s standing still for him, and for everybody else stuck behind these walls. So he’ll just keep slicing and dicing us, taking out ribs and deflating lungs, and none of it will work, because none of it can work, and we’ll go on like that until the end of time if something isn’t done.” He blew out a long, exasperated sigh, and I was sure that I could hear genuine despair lurking hiding behind it.

  “Well, I think we can do something about it.” Becky stopped pacing. “Danny, you know all about this. How do we—” She stopped suddenly, in mid-sentence, and cocked her head to one side as she listened intently to something I couldn’t hear yet. Then I did hear it. Footsteps, walking at a fast pace along the outside balcony. Footsteps that were coming our way

  I would come to find out later that his name was Jacob Dickes, although he preferred to go by ‘Jake.’ Jake was in his late twenties, and powerfully built. The dude obviously worked out.

  My first thought, when he appeared behind Billy in the doorway to Matilda’s room, was that the wispy mustache that clung to his top lip was going to make it really difficult to take the guy seriously. It was the kind that some of the kids at school like to call a ‘molestache,’ because it looked like it belonged on a molester or something, I guess. Despite the shock of his appearance, I broke out into a nervous smirk.

  But then my second thought was: scratch that. Because the gun he was pointing straight at me was making me want to take him very, very seriously indeed. Suddenly, the molestache wasn’t even remotely funny any more. My entire world had narrowed down to just the doorway, Billy’s semi-transparent body, and above all else, the ominous black muzzle of the handgun.

  “Got yer!” he said triumphantly. “You, put your hands where I can see ‘em.” He nodded at me, then turned the gun on Becky, who was pressing herself backwards into the shadows of the opposite doorway, the one that led into the central corridor. “Yours too. Up where Jakey can see ‘em, now. Nice and slow. That’s it.”

  We both raised our hands slowly into the air, palms facing forwards to show that they were empty…at least, mostly empty, because I was still clutching a flashlight in my right hand.

  Jake took a couple of steps backward onto the balcony. The moonlight gleamed on the barrel of his gun, making it even harder for me to tear my eyes away from it; but despite that, something else had caught my attention, and a few seconds later Jake confirmed it when he mumbled around a mouthful of chewing tobacco for Becky and I to step out there onto the balcony with him.

  “The pair of you, get your butts out here.”

  T
he pair of you, I repeated softly to myself. He doesn’t know about Billy and Matilda. He can’t see them.

  It had always fascinated me how some people could see ghosts (under the right circumstances) and others never could, no matter what. Becky couldn’t normally see them, for example, but obviously Billy and Matilda had wanted to be seen, because we’d all just had a conversation together as if we were four living, solid people. The same had been true with Lamiyah earlier tonight, and also with Polly and Mister Long Brook.

  We hesitated. Jake didn’t like that one bit.

  “I said get out here!”

  I thought that people only fired warning shots on TV and in movies. Boy, was I wrong. From only six feet away, the sound was deafening. Becky squealed and I’m pretty sure I did too. The bullet missed both of us— I’m pretty sure that it was meant to, because nobody short of an Imperial Stormtrooper could have missed us at that close range unless they had wanted it that way —and ricocheted from the floor into one of the walls, shattering the plaster and what was left of the drywall.

  The ghosts of Billy and Matilda had vanished, throwing the room back into near-total darkness again. I moved slowly out onto the balcony, heading towards the dim outline of the man with the gun. As I came through the outer doorway I must have blocked Jake’s line of sight towards Becky for just a moment, and that was all the break she needed.

  Becky took off. I could hear her footsteps pounding away from us along the central corridor. She was heading toward the main building, unless the acoustics were playing tricks on my ears.

  “Hey!” Jake yelled. I couldn’t see his features well because of the gloom, but his body language was telling me that he was torn about whether to go after her, or stay here and keep control of me. After a few seconds of indecision, he obviously decided to try and do both. A tattooed fist grabbed the front of my shirt. Jake began to drag me along the length of the balcony in the same direction that Becky had fled.

  “You’re too late, man. You’ll never catch her now. She’ll be back with the cops in no time.” I hoped that I sounded braver and more confident than I felt.

  Jake rewarded me with a growled “shut up!” and smacked me around the back of the head with his knuckles. White dots exploded in front of my eyes, making me gasp as pain flared through the rear of my skull.

  He was picking up the pace now. I struggled to keep up and to keep my balance. My eyes were watering, making my vision blur. As we passed patient room after patient room, I could see the ghostly blue outlines of the occupants smudged against my field of vision. Some were sitting up in their beds, while others were standing in their doorways, all of them taking a keen interest in the goings-on.

  Long Brook really was beginning to wake up, and unless I was reading the energies wrong, it wasn’t going to be in a particularly welcoming mood.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was hoping that Becky was smart enough to just head for the closest exit and take cover in the trees, then work her way towards the highway. There’s no way anybody would be able to track her down if she kept her wits about her and just stuck to the treeline.

  At least, I hoped not.

  We had reached the end of the patient wing, the point at which it joined the main administration building. Jake hustled me into the stairwell. I was out of breath and wheezing from the exertion of being dragged the full length of the balcony, so the rest was actually kind of welcome.

  What wasn’t welcome was the circle of cold metal that I suddenly felt pressed against my right temple. There was an ominous click.

  Who the hell was this psycho?

  “You had better get yourself back out here, Missy. I’ve got a gun to your little buddy’s head, and if you ain’t out here by the count of three, I’m gonna blow what passes for his brains right out of his skull. One…”

  Jake didn’t get to count to two.

  We were both motionless on the landing. The only light came from outside, bleeding in through the open window behind us, and it was just enough that I could make out each individual step on the staircase and the handrail that ran along the outer wall. She was heard before she was seen, tentative little footsteps on the landing above us, one after the other. They were coming slowly towards us down the stairs.

  “That’s right,” Jake encouraged, his voice sounding far creepier than anything else we’d encountered so far tonight. “You come on down here, honey, and nobody has to get hurt. I just need to talk to you, see? Then you and your pals can go.”

  Pals? Did that mean that Brandon was still alive? I sure hoped so. I hadn’t seen any blood when he went down, but it was so hard to tell in the chaos of the moment.

  Hope suddenly surged up inside me at the prospect of him being okay after all.

  But what emerged from the switchback on the staircase wasn’t Becky at all; it was Polly. And from the way I felt the muzzle of the gun suddenly break contact with my skin, I knew that Jake had to be able to see her too.

  “What the…” The big creep was lost for words, and looking at it from his point of view, it wasn’t difficult to see why.

  Polly was outlined in a blazing red and orange light that danced like the flames around the Eye of Sauron. From the way that her aura reflected on the wall and ceiling, it looked almost as if the staircase was on fire. More disturbing than that was the intense look of aggression on Polly’s face. She was pretty angry at him right now.

  Yep, Jake’s first exposure to the truth of life after death was an enraged, little girl who was glaring daggers at him as she descended slowly and deliberately, getting closer and closer with every passing second. Oh, and he could see through her body, which had to be massively freaking out his tiny little brain.

  Polly raised her arm and pointed straight at him. “You are a very, very bad man.”

  Uh-oh. She was angry alright. That tone was scaring the crap out of me, and I hadn’t even done anything to get on her bad side.

  “You need to let Danny go, bad man. You need to let him go right now.”

  I looked up at Jake’s face, now lit up in the false firelight streaming from Polly’s spirit body. His eyes were wide and gleaming, and his mouth flapped open and shut repeatedly as he searched for the right words — any words. Finally, he settled upon the classic thug line: “or what?”

  There were only four stairs between her and us now. Polly dropped her accusatory finger and responded simply, “Or you’ll get hurt. Badly.”

  Jake’s manic laugh echoed hollowly up and down the enclosed stairwell. It sounded much more hysterical than amused.

  “Listen to the little ghost girl threaten me!” he cackled, bringing the gun up to point towards her. “Who’s going to hurt me, kid — you?”

  Polly took another step down towards him, and suddenly the pistol cracked twice in quick succession. I slapped my hands up to my ears, practically deafened in the confined space.

  The bullets passed straight through Polly’s body and plunged into the wooden stairs behind her.

  “No, not me,” she said quietly, not in the least bit flustered by the noise and flash of the gunfire. “I won’t hurt you. It’s not nice to hurt people. But Mister Long Brook will.”

  “Oh man, you are so screwed.”

  I couldn’t help it. It just popped right out of my mouth. And there he was, standing at the top of the staircase, outlined in the same angry red-and-orange firelight that surrounded Polly; his was both brighter and much more intense, though, a raging inferno when compared to her tiny campfire aura.

  Jake’s grip on me was all but forgotten, and luckily I had the presence of mind to take full advantage of his distraction. I had never been very strong and I had lost all three of the fights I had ever gotten into with bullies, but it’s amazing what fear and adrenaline can do to motivate you.

  I balled up my right hand into a fist and drove it straight into Jake’s crotch. As hard as I possibly could.

  To his credit, he didn’t drop the gun, but the douchebag folded in half, his
left hand dropping to protect his injured, extremely sensitive parts. Throwing the rickety old door open on rusted hinges, I bolted out onto the balcony, determined to put some distance between us.

  Becky was peeking out from around the doorframe of the third patient room along, and she beckoned frantically towards me with one hand, the other holding a warning finger up to her lips in a shushing sort of way.

  After hastily joining Becky in the empty patient room, I turned and could hear Mister Long Brook bounding down the stairs, probably taking them three at a time, and passing through Polly on the way down. Jake barely had time to squeeze off two more shots, both of which must have passed harmlessly through the two angry spirits, before the huge creature slammed into him and knocked him off his feet, sending him sprawling onto the balcony in front of us.

  Mister Long Brook opened what must have been a mouth (though I couldn’t see any teeth or a tongue in there, just more blackness) and bellowed. I couldn’t help flinching.

  Peeking out from behind one of his massive legs, Polly watched with a weird, mischievous little smile as Jake hit the ground hard and slid maybe ten or fifteen feet, cracking his head against the brick parapet along the way.

  “Damn, but that had to hurt,” I whispered, shaking my head sympathetically. Then I remembered that this slime had just held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me. The sympathy dissolved pretty quickly after that.

  Shaking his head like a disorientated drunk, Jake somehow propped himself up on his elbows. He obviously had no idea what had just hit him, his face a slack, expressionless glaze. A thin line of drool dribbled down from his lower lip. I watched in horrified fascination as the slobber settled on his chest.

  It was a good thing that the glass panes were long gone from the windows of those patient rooms, because the next roar from Mister Long Brook would have been loud enough to shatter them all outright. The giant began to plod purposefully towards Jake, who retained at least enough presence of mind to recognize imminent danger when it was bearing down on him.